All those who, up to that time, had not been able to see anything, then perceived the public enemy raised above the heads of the crowd.
New shouts were then heard; but these were against the executioners. Were they about to kill Foulon so expeditiously?
The executioners merely shrugged their shoulders, and pointed to the rope.
The rope was old; it could be seen to give way, strand by strand. The movements which Foulon made in his desperate agony at length broke the last strand; and Foulon, only half strangled, fell heavily upon the pavement.
He was only at the preface of his torments; he had only penetrated into the vestibule of death.
They all rushed towards the sufferer; they were perfectly secure with regard to him. There was no chance of his escaping them; in falling he had broken his leg a little below the knee.
And yet some imprecations arose, imprecations which were unintelligible and calumniatory. The executioners were accused; they were considered as clumsy and unskilful,—they who, on the contrary, had been so ingenious that they had expressly chosen an old worn-out rope, in the hope that it would break.
A hope which the event, as has been related, had fully realized.
They made a knot in the rope, and again fixed it round the neck of the unhappy man, who, half dead, with haggard eyes looked around, endeavoring to discover whether in that city which is called the centre of the civilized universe,—whether one of the bayonets of that king whose minister he had been, and who had a hundred thousand, would not be raised in his defence amid that horde of cannibals.
But there was nothing there to meet his eyes but hatred, but insult, but death.
“At least, kill me at once, without making me endure these atrocious torments!” cried the despairing Foulon.
“Well, now,” replied a jeering voice, “why should we abridge your torments? you have made ours last long enough.”
“And besides,” said another, “you have not yet had time enough to digest your nettles.”
“Wait, wait a little!” cried a third; “his son-in-law, Berthier, will be brought to him; there is room enough for him on the opposite lamp-post.”
“We shall see what wry faces the father-in-law and son-in-law will make at each other,” added another.
“Finish me; finish me at once!” cried the wretched man.
During this time, Bailly and Lafayette were begging, supplicating, exclaiming, and endeavoring to get through the crowd; suddenly, Foulon was again hoisted by the rope, which again broke, and their prayers, their supplications, their agony, no less painful than that of the sufferer himself, were lost, confounded, and extinguished amid the universal laugh which accompanied this second fall.
Bailly and Lafayette, who three days before had been the sovereign arbiters of the will of six hundred thousand Parisians,—a child now would not listen to them; the people even murmured at them; they were in their way; they were interrupting this great spectacle.
Billot had vainly given them all the aid of his uncommon strength; the powerful athlete had knocked down twenty men, but in order to reach Foulon it would be necessary to knock down fifty, a hundred, two hundred; and his strength is exhausted, and when he pauses to wipe from his brow the perspiration and the blood which is streaming from it, Foulon is raised a third time to the pulley of the lamp-post.
This time they had taken compassion upon him; the rope was a new one.
At last the condemned is dead; the victim no longer suffers.
Half a minute had sufficed to the crowd to assure itself that the vital spark was extinguished. And now that the tiger has killed, he may devour his prey.
The body, thrown from the top of the lamp-post, did not even fall to the ground. It was torn to pieces before it reached it.
The head was separated from the trunk in a second, and in another second raised on the end of a pike. It was very much in fashion in those days to carry the heads of one’s enemies in that way.
At this sanguinary spectacle Bailly was horrified. That head appeared to him to be the head of the Medusa of ancient days.